Lovecraft Howard Phillips - Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales

In the hope of later solving the cryptogram, Blake bore off the volume in his coat pocket. Many of the great tomes on the shelves fascinated him unutterably, and he felt tempted to borrow them at some later time.

For Sheila:

Literature lover, Lovecraft skeptic

TOUR de

LOVECRAFT

- the tales -

By Kenneth Hite

Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales Kindle Edition is published by Atomic Overmind Press.

Book Layout and Design by Hal Mangold

Cover by Hal Mangold and Kenneth Hite

Interior illustrations by Toren Macbin Atkinson

Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales Kindle Edition 2011 by Kenneth Hite. All rights reserved. Please dont pirate this book, or the Terrible Old Man will be Terribly Upset.

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Stock number AOP1001, August 2008.

ISBN 10: 0-9816792-0-X

ISBN 13: 978-0-9816792-0-4

Printed in the United States.

Table of Contents

Foreword

John Scott Tynes

Like many admirers, I first encountered Lovecrafts work as a teenager. I read The Colour Out of Space aloud to my Boy Scout troop on a campout, having found it in my parents library. From there I descended steadily into a lightless void of obsession and shortly before my twentieth birthday I found myself devoured by a Lovecraftian beast known as Pagan Publishing, a small press I founded and ran for the next twelve years. In those years I dwelled nearer to the epicenter of Lovecraft fandom than is perhaps healthy, but the creative and personal rewards were great which is not to say that I escaped the same tradition of shabby-genteel starvation embodied by good old HPL.

During that period, I made several pilgrimages to Providence, Rhode Island, for the NecronomiCon convention. On one of these trips I set out from the hotel on foot and walked the two and a half miles to Swan Point Cemetery, where Lovecraft is buried. I arrived shortly before midnight on August 19th, the eve of his birthday, bearing nothing but a hand-drawn map of the cemetery and a cigarette lighter, which I could only keep lit for a few moments before the heat against my thumb became unbearable. I crept into the moonlit cemetery, mindful of dogs and night watchmen alike, and with the occasional flash of flame I navigated my way through the headstones until I found the Philips family plot. There lay the humble stone reading I AM PROVIDENCE, lain only in recent years, that marked the final transition of H.P. Lovecraft.

We had a conversation that night, HPL and I, as I sat before his tombstone. Admittedly it was a rather one-sided dialogue, but he seemed game (if quiet) and I had plenty to say. Midnight came and went, I wished him a happy birthday, and then this nocturnal Tour de Lovecraft came to an end.

I wish I could speak of what we spoke, but some sorceries are best left silent. Light illuminates everything but shadows, and those it simply destroys. I believe the world is a better place with mysteries left in it.

Ken Hite is that rarity, a source of illumination that shines upon the shadows and makes them darker: an inverted trapezohedron, perhaps, the anti-antiprism. As a source of information he is delightfully unreliable. Fact, rumor, supposition, and outright bunk all bubble and boil in his creative cauldron and exude a miasma of the unknown. A discussion of Schroedingers Cat with Ken is likely to lead to conjecture as to whether the fabled chess-playing automaton known as the Turk might well have been operated by Lewis Carrolls Cheshire feline, a line of enquiry not altogether obvious yet somehow weirdly resonant. All of this, of course, makes him an exemplary tour guide, for that is a profession built upon a scaffold of hokum.

There have been three Tours de Hite in my life.

One summer I stayed with Ken and his wife Sheila in Chicago. Ken led me through the city, illuminating his favorite examples of architecture, mysticism, and their many children. Chicago is really Kens London, his great metropolis of the west. In the way that Tolkien was driven to create a mythology for the land he loved, weaving it together from bits of dead languages and obscure folklore, so too has Ken ensorcelled Chicago and given it a mythic resonance few could perceive unaided. At times his eyes gleam with a messianic fervor and you know the little gray cells of his mind are hard at work preparing their next unwholesome discourse. Of course, like Nyarlathotep come out of Egypt, all Kens narratives run towards apocalypse.

On another occasion, Ken visited me in Memphis at my ancestral home so I could return the favor. Chicago, it may be said, has no king but rather a succession of princes. Memphis has no such lack. Its king lies in eternal repose at Graceland, not dead but dreaming, awaiting the day when he and JFK and Marilyn and all the other gods of America burst forth from our hearts and reassert themselves in the firmament. We visited Graceland 2, the mystically antipodal reincarnation of Elviss playland as the home of a father-and-son team of Elvis impersonators and idolaters. Sphinx-like, they riddle visitors but make no sense. Ken and I roamed the city and the surrounding environs, conjugating insanity and paranoia as we went. It was somehow comforting to be on my territory rather than his, but then Ken brings his mental landscape with him everywhere he goes and it tends to subsume the unwary.

For our third tour, neither of us was the guide. Like Harley Warren and Randolph Carter, we set forth in search of dark knowledge in the city of Las Vegas. Everywhere we were surrounded by mystic correspondences and haunting symbols. Cultural, religious, and mythic archetypes loomed large in neon and the psychic weight of all that soul-detritus drove us to drink. Or perhaps it was the other way around.

Which brings us to Kens latest tour, a genial ramble through the Lovecraft canon. I followed the original publication of these dispatches on his website with interest, as the prospect of Ken turning his strange illumination upon the corpus was too delightful to resist. My attention was rewarded, as will be yours, with his many insights, associations, and criticisms of these familiar tales. Because Ken is first and foremost a creative writer, and not a critic or scholar, he brings to his discursion the camaraderie of a fellow traveler. Other critics, preoccupied with Lovecraft in his historical, psychological, and social contexts, tend to read the stories as some combination of autobiography and existential diatribe. Kens creative sympathies mean he can speak to Lovecraft as an imaginative craftsman who wielded plot, symbol, theme, and character in the service of his art. Authors tend to make indifferent critics, as they are temperamentally inclined towards the brief but cutting pronouncement rather than the sustained critique. This makes Kens observations particularly welcome.